


for the moment i know this

by seeingrightly



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-02
Updated: 2014-12-02
Packaged: 2018-02-27 20:43:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2706104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seeingrightly/pseuds/seeingrightly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>after a few days, the first postcard arrives.</p>
<p>-</p>
<p>winter break of laura hollis's freshman year at silas university.</p>
            </blockquote>





	for the moment i know this

**Author's Note:**

> lmao pls excuse all of the philosophy i googled okay and please forgive me if i fucked up or misattributed anything and please forgive that i couldn't line break that poem properly omg
> 
> this isn't beta read bc i wanted to post it before the finale episode goes up god help me
> 
> title is - shockingly!!! - a camus quote
> 
> p.s. the only (i think? i hope?) unattributed quote, the newark postcard, is by philip roth

Winter break is – weird, to say the least. And that’s a lot, coming from Laura, after the first semester she’s had.

The thing is, Carmilla kind of came back from the dead during finals, right, and they’d just defeated this big band of baddies, and Laura didn’t know if she’d failed all of her classes, and – oh, right, Carmilla _came back from the dead_.

It’s a blur, when Laura remembers it, probably because Laura was crying but also probably because Laura was in some kind of actual medical shock. She thinks maybe she threw some things. Mostly she remembers waking up with her face pressed into her yellow pillowcase, and Carmilla’s face also pressed into her yellow pillowcase, a few inches away, eyes wide open and kinda creepy.

“Ohmygod,” Laura said, and then after a second she added, “I dreamed about cat-you drooling on me. Was that real?”

Carmilla sat up, pulling the covers with her, and put her head in her hands, elbows on her knees. Laura followed, her fingertips brushing Carmilla’s shoulder blade.

“Carm?”

“You’re being so…” Carmilla ground out. “Normal.”

“Sorry?” Laura said.

“You never do what I expect,” Carmilla said, turning to look at Laura with wide eyes.

She looked younger than Laura’d ever seen her. Lost. When Laura reached up to brush Carmilla’s bangs back, Carmilla grabbed her hand lightning-quick and pulled it to her cheek. Laura felt a crooked smile crawl across her face, watched Carmilla watch it.

“Hey,” Laura said. “I missed you. Even though you’re the worst roommate ever.”

Carmilla did that thing she does where she looks down and quirks up the corners of her mouth for a split second, like she doesn’t know if she’s happy or sad.

“You know you don’t have to keep me,” she said, lowering Laura’s hand between them but keeping both of her own hands clasped loosely around it. “Betty _is_ back.”

Laura opened her mouth, ready to say, _but I want to keep you_ , but she hesitated. Carmilla’d been _kept_ for centuries. Carmilla was free to do whatever she wanted for the first time since – well, the only other time she’d been able to do that was after she escaped from being buried alive and before her mother caught her again. There were probably all sorts of things Carmilla wanted to do and see, lots more exciting than a dorm room at a school she’d known for ages. Lots more exciting than being _kept_ by Laura.

Laura flopped onto her back, and Carmilla turned to follow, leaning on her elbow, her hair tickling Laura’s arm.

“You can do whatever you want now,” Laura said, awed.

“Can I,” Carmilla said, quiet and kind of droll, but her eyes looked sad.

Laura pressed her lips together as she watched Carmilla stare down at the bedspread, but she didn’t last more than a few seconds.

“Send me postcards,” she said. “Please.”

Carmilla looked up at her, more serious than Laura thought she’d ever seen her.

“I will,” Carmilla said.

-

Being home with her dad is weird because it’s not weird, at first. It’s too normal. There’s no camera to talk into. There’s no threats. Well, Laura’s dad sees threats everywhere, the same threats he always has, but to Laura, a lot of them look silly in comparison to the things she dealt with at school, and she can’t tell her dad about that.

And then, after a few days, the first postcard arrives.

The front is a glossy picture of a few old-looking buildings; Laura doesn’t really know a lot about architecture, and she also hasn’t heard of Villeblevin, France before. She takes a second to wonder how much money Carmilla spent on shipping to get it here so quickly, given how unreliable international post usually is.

There’s a staple stuck through what looks like some sort of chapel, and when she turns over the postcard, attached to it, next to Laura’s address written in spiky little letters, is a piece of paper torn from a book. It’s yellowed and wrinkled badly, like it was crumpled up more than once. There edges are crumbling away and blackened. It says:

“What really counted was the possibility of escape, a leap of freedom, out of the implacable ritual, a wild run for it that would give whatever chance for hope there was. Of course, hope meant being cut down on some street corner, as you ran like mad, by a random bullet. But when I really thought it through, nothing was going to allow me such a luxury. Everything was against it; I would just be caught up in the machinery again.”

Laura imagines Carmilla holding the page above a candle, rescuing it at the last second. She sits on the edge of her bed and holds the postcard between her hands, not really sure what Carmilla is trying to tell her.

She winds up on Google, cross-legged on top of her quilt and ignoring her dad’s call that dinner is ready. It’s from Camus’s _The Stranger_ , and incidentally, Carmilla’s in the town where he died, because Carmilla is morbid like that. The quote itself is – well, it seems about as existential as it gets, not that Laura knows all that much about the philosophy. She’s always been a good English student, but philosophy is a bit outside her range of expertise.

Laura knows enough to know that the quote and its sense of futility sound like Carmilla’s life in her mother’s grasp. But – Carmilla’s life is different now, right? Maybe Carmilla is frustrated that her philosophies aren’t really applicable anymore.

It’s still kind of weird for her to send the quote to Laura, though, right, unless – unless she thinks Laura can reply with something useful? And that’s not a huge amount of pressure or anything. Come up with an intelligent, philosophical way to cheer up a broody, centuries-old vampire that is – or was – or is? – maybe almost your girlfriend.

She jumps when her dad sets a plate down on the bed next to her.

“I know that face,” he says. “That’s your research face. I thought you don’t get homework over winter break. Is it something for school?”

“Um,” Laura says, blinking at the many tabs of existential philosophers up on her screen. “Sorta?”

“Don’t stay up too late,” her dad says, smiling the way he does when he thinks Laura’s being weird. “And at least bring the plate to the sink when you’re done, okay? We don’t need ants again.”

“Sure thing, Dad,” Laura says, shoveling rice into her mouth blindly with one hand, and brushing stray grains off of the keyboard as she types with the other.

It takes her a couple of hours to find something that seems applicable, and even then it seems really corny, but she’s pretty sure she remembers Carmilla saying she liked Sartre. Assuming that that’s how you spell the weird French name Carmilla had said. A couple of seconds into feeling accomplished, grinning in the dark at her laptop screen, Laura realizes that she needs a way to give Carmilla her message.

It’s unlikely that Carmilla is staying for long in the town where Camus died or whatever. She’s probably on the move, so Laura can’t send a postcard back. Laura groans and flops back against her pillows, and her laptop overturns on her lap and she smashes a bunch of buttons with her knees, and when she rights the laptop, her webcam has turned on.

“Huh,” Laura says.

She knows, she knows for a fact that, by the end, Carmilla was watching her videos. And she knows that Carmilla uses the internet on her phone, since she’s not stuck in the Stone Age like Laura. Hopefully, at some point in the near future, Carmilla will miraculously happen to wander into a European Starbucks and happen to connect to Wi-Fi and happen to check if Laura’s uploaded any new videos.

It’s worth a shot.

Laura literally shrugs to herself and balances the laptop on her knees, too excited to care about the bad angle or the state of her hair. She presses record, and she takes a deep breath, and then she reads the quote:

“Life begins on the other side of despair.”

She ends the recording, takes another deep breath, and uploads it right away so she won’t change her mind. If anyone else happens to watch the video, for some reason, even though the semester is over and so is her journalism class and they already saved the day and whatever, they’ll have no idea what Laura is talking about, but then again they kind of didn’t half the time anyway. It doesn’t matter.

What matters is that Carmilla might see it, and it might matter to her.

-

The next postcard comes a few days later – a cityscape of old buildings. Prague. Laura’s tempted to look up which philosopher died in Prague before she even turns the postcard over to see the message written in Carmilla’s small but aggressive handwriting:

“You are free and that is why you are lost.”

Laura’s confused, maybe even more confused than last time, because this time she expected to _get_ it. But she doesn’t! Why is Carmilla accusing Laura of being lost? If anything, Laura feels a little too found at the moment, wandering around at home in her socks and feeling some kind of itch under her skin.

She tosses the postcard onto her desk and doesn’t let herself look at it for a couple of days. She’s half asleep and mostly certain that she’s imagining or dreaming or _something_ ing the feeling of silky fur against the back of her hand where it rests against her stomach when she flinches awake.

Carmilla’s the one who’s lost. Carmilla’s the one who’s free. _Duh_.

She boots up her laptop – no cats in sight, _duh_ – and finally lets herself Google the quote. Kafka was born in Prague, which is a pleasant change, but not enough to make Laura feel less uneasy about Carmilla’s apparent existential crisis. Like, for _real_ existential crisis. More for real than her whole centuries-long brood sesh.

Laura takes a second to consider the tabs she still has open, and figures it couldn’t hurt for Carmilla to hear from her favorite guy, Camus. She clicks over to her sticky notes where she’s been storing quotes that might be of use. She’s having trouble finding ones that make sense that aren’t totally tacky. Without context, a lot of them sound like they belong on motivational posters. But maybe that’s what Carmilla needs right now? A fortune cookie phrase from her not-girlfriend?

She sighs and turns on her webcam, smiling at the screen for a second before she reads a quote:

“In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.”

Laura feels a little silly even as she says it. What does Laura know? She’s just a kid. Who isn’t even a philosophy major. Carmilla’s probably read that line a hundred times. Why should Laura saying it make any difference?

She posts the video anyway, and then tries to fall asleep.

-

It takes a bit longer for the next postcard to arrive, and Laura nearly rips it in half she grips it so tightly with both hands. It’s a picture of a beach lined by lots of big, rectangular, white buildings – Algiers, Algeria. The writing on the back is a bit neater this time, like it was written out slowly, carefully:

“I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.”

Laura frowns down at the postcard. “For the first time”? That doesn’t sound right. Carmilla certainly isn’t new to the whole existential thing. And it kind of – it kind of sounds like she’s giving up.

The long Laura looks at it, the angrier she gets. Why is Carmilla bothering to tell her that she’s giving into the meaninglessness of the universe or whatever? What does she want Laura to do about it when Laura can’t even properly contact her?

She slams her bedroom door behind her, and she reads the postcard one more time before she crumples it up and throws it across her room, where it bounces off into her closet. She lets it stay there.

-

Four days. She goes four whole days.

On the fifth day, she starts reading again, and on the fifth day, she stumbles across the quote Carmilla sent her while reading about Camus. Laura instantly tenses up and turns toward her closet, like the postcard is going to be standing there with its hands on its hips, glaring at her for taking so long.

Weirder things have happened. To Laura, specifically.

It’s not exactly _guaranteed_ that Carmilla watched Laura’s video and decided to respond to her Camus quote with a Camus quote. There’s no way to know. But it’s a quote from _The Stranger_. Which Carmilla probably previously set on fire and/or otherwise destroyed.

That’s gotta mean – something, right? Some kind of progress?

Laura reads the quote again and again.

“I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.”

She still doesn’t really know what it means, but it doesn’t feel so – so _final_ anymore. After all, it says for the _first_ time, not the last, right? Maybe it’s a beginning, not an ending. Maybe it’s a question. Maybe Carmilla doesn’t really know what it means anymore either. Maybe Carmilla and Laura are equally confused.

But Laura’s not confused about everything.

_I want to keep you_ , she thinks, and she turns on her webcam for the first time in what feels like ages. 

Last week, before this postcard, blushing in the darkness of her room, Laura had Googled “existential quotes love,” and she had saved quotes on a sticky note and then hid it behind a bunch of other sticky notes so she wouldn’t have to look at it. But now she pulls it up and scrolls until she finds the quote she wants, the one by Carl Sagan, who isn’t even a philosopher, but Laura doesn’t care. It might piss Carmilla off that he’s not a philosopher, and that makes Laura like it more.

She takes a shaky breath as she presses record:

“For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.”

Her voice trembles a little, catches a couple of times, and she squeezes her eyes shut for a whole second halfway through. It’s embarrassing to rewatch.

Laura uploads it anyway.

-

She actually laughs out loud when she gets the next postcard. It comes nearly a week later, a gut-wrenching week, and when it does arrive it’s bizarrely from Newark, New Jersey, cartoony greeting and everything. She’s got a smile on her face but her hands are still shaking a little when she turns it over. The handwriting is spikier than Laura’s ever seen it:

“The only obsession everyone wants: ‘love.’ People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you’re whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You’re whole, and then you’re cracked open.”

Laura drops the postcard on the floor like it burned her fingertips.

She’s halfway to her room when she changes her mind, runs back to pick it up, if only because she doesn’t want her dad to find it. When she gets to her room, though, she lets herself drop it on the floor again, pretend that’s where she dropped it the first time, pretend to kick it under the bed by accident.

She pretends she’s not going to think about it.

She lays in bed for most of the afternoon.

Was Carmilla cracked open by Ell? Is Laura going to be fractured by Carmilla? Does it even matter what it is that’s scaring Carmilla off, if she’s already gone?

-

Two more postcards arrive the next morning, both from Villeblevin, France again. Laura pauses for a second to wonder if it matters which one she reads first. The one on top, handwriting frantic and cramped, says:

“Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.”

Carmilla is scared. Carmilla is – begging, maybe. It’s like she’s asking Laura to let her off the hook. Laura shakes her head, turns to the other postcard before she lets herself come to any kind of decision. The handwriting on this one is just as sloppy:

“After another moment's silence she mumbled that I was peculiar, that that was probably why she loved me but that one day I might disgust her for the very same reason.”

Laura lets out a disbelieving laugh. Leave it to Carmilla to put all her insecurities on display, but only once she’s running around the world and hard to contact, and only through pretentious code. It actually kind of makes Laura feel a lot better, that a lot of Carmilla’s angsting about this is probably – well, a lot more _human_ than she originally thought. Not so peculiar after all.

She winds up sitting in front of her webcam with a crooked smile on her face and part of a poem by Derek Keck in front of her, her voice strong and steady as she reads:

“I say, we live on, though I am wrong, this is what I say. In the past, present, future, we live on as if in one time. You can never stop the past from happening, and it has happened , and will continue to happen. This is the truth, I think I know, along with the two other things I do know. I exist. I want to kiss you. And also this: each day, as we go, we will always be as young as we can be.”

Laura smiles as she talks, and smiles as she uploads the video, and smiles until she looks at a calendar and notices that she’s supposed to go back to school in four days.

-

When Laura moves back into her dorm room at Silas, the other half of the room is still a messy mix of Betty and Carmilla’s stuff. She doesn’t know if that means that no one’s moved in yet, or if the university hasn’t done anything about the situation, or if Betty is coming back to room with her, or if –

Well. Laura doesn’t want to get her hopes up.

She gets all of her things situated. She puts her laptop back into place and her sweater on the back of her desk chair and she sits down and looks at the little circle that is her webcam.

She turns it on before she can stop to think about it.

“So,” she starts. “Semester two at Silas University. I’m sure more wacky and unbelievable and life-threatening things will happen in the months to come. So. I might as well document it, right? And I guess I should probably update you – if anyone is even still watching these – about what’s been going on in my life recently.”

Laura swivels awkwardly in her chair for a second.

“Okay, if you watched any of my videos that I posted over the break, you’re probably wondering what the deal was. Aaaand all I can really tell you is that it involved a… recently-no-longer-deceased… undead friend of ours.”

Laura claps her hands together and smiles winningly at the camera.

“I think that covers that. Alright, what else –”

The door behind her creaks open, and Laura pauses, shoots the camera a look, and then swivels a bit to look over her shoulder.

Carmilla is standing in the doorway, her hair falling into her face as usual and her big green duffel slung over one shoulder.

“Um,” Laura says.

Carmilla slouches into the room, dropping the duffel on the floor before she moves forward, perching on the edge of Laura’s bed and leaning forward, her expression intensely focused.

“My dear,” she begins in a lilting tone, and Laura can tell that she’s reciting something. “In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love.”

Carmilla pauses, quirks a little smile as she looks away, like she’s embarrassed or something, and Laura feels her chest do something funny.

“In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile. In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm. I realized, through it all, that…”

Carmilla takes a steadying breath, and Laura takes one with her.

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer,” Carmilla says, her eyes boring into Laura, who’s gripping the seat of her chair so tightly she can’t feel her fingertips anymore.

“And that makes me happy,” Carmilla continues. “For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.”

After a pause, Carmilla stands up and turns to the camera.

“Albert Camus,” she says, and then she slams the laptop shut.

“Oh,” Laura says.

Carmilla’s kind of hovering over her, so Laura stands up too, kicking the chair out of the way.

“Um,” Laura adds.

“That all you’ve got to say, sweetheart?” Carmilla asks, a smirk on her face.

“Oh, shut up,” Laura says, waving her hands between them. “You don’t get to be all weird and mysterious and cosmopolitan angst and then come back here and be all sexy-cool no-big-deal about it!”

Carmilla raises her eyebrows.

“You want me to go?” she asks, raising one hand to inspect her nails, but Laura sees her shoulders riding high and the tight line of her lips.

“No!” Laura says. “I want to keep you, you big jerk! How many different ways do I have to say it? Do I need to learn French next?”

Carmilla lets out a surprised little huff of a laugh, staring up at Laura from under her bangs.

“Foolish,” she says quietly, wonderingly.

“Everything I do is foolish and you love it,” Laura says, reaching out to grab Carmilla’s arm and yank her forward. “Get over it.”

Carmilla crashes into Laura chest-to-chest, probably due to shock, and she blinks all up close and lets Laura wrap her arms around her middle.

“Oh,” Carmilla says, her voice low and soft.

“That all you’ve got to say, sweetheart?” Laura asks, raising her eyebrows mockingly.

“Yes,” Carmilla says, her eyes on Laura’s lips, and Laura helps her out and bridges the gap between them.

**Author's Note:**

> find me on tumblr at [professorwolfjwolf](professorwolfjwolf.tumblr.com).


End file.
